[Wikipedia-l] Plans for RecentChanges page; programmers only!

[Jan Hidders]

Dear fellow programmers,

I saw that the SQL code for the Recent Changes page is rather inefficient
and causes a lot of database access, so I decided to improve this. However,
I can only do this properly if the timestamp field in the tables is split in
a day and a time field. In order to minimze the inconvenience for the other
programmers I suggest to split my work in three steps as follows.

Step 1:
1. I will add an SQL script file 'addNewTimeStamps.sql' that changes the
table definitions and fills the new columns with the values computed from
the old time stamps. Jimbo needs to run this to convert the existing
database to the new format.
2. I will make a new dump for 'Wikipedia.sql'.
3. I will adapt every write action in the script to the tables 'old' and
'cur' such that the the new columns are also written.
4. Test and then submit to cvs.

Step 2:
1. start programming on the Recent Changes page.
2  test and submit.

Step 3:
1. Write an SQL script 'removeOldTimeStamps.sql' that removes the old time
stamp columns. This should also be run by Jimbo when he installs the patch
that contains this step.
2. Adapt the scripts that read and write the cur table and old table, so
they don't use the old columns anymore.
3. Test and submit.

If anyone has objections, a better plan, or would like me to wait with this
until a certain piece of work has been finished, please let me know.

Kind regards,

-- Jan Hidders